The Secret Plan to Screw Us All

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For the love of Mary, stop them now, please?

The idea — and here it comes again — that there are Democratic legislators still willing to work with anyone from the House Republican side on any issue of great national import is proof positive that P.T. Barnum's calculations were sadly awry on the relationship of suckers born per minute. The idea that we are still seriously talking about deficit reduction as the first issue among the many makes me wonder if anyone will take seriously this blog's basic economic philosophy: Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. And the idea that people are talking about cutting entitlements now, given the catastrophe that austerity regimes are visiting upon people all over Europe, and given what's happening out in the states, makes me wonder if our governing elites are in conspiracy to drive Paul Krugman completely insane.

More immediately, what in hell is goddamn Heath Shuler even doing in the room, let alone driving the Democratic side of the "secret" negotiations? The man is a career incompetent. In two careers. He's the Bluest — and the Doggiest — of Blue Dogs. And, on top of everything else, he's a lame duck. What possibly qualifies him as a Democratic leader on anything except the proper way to pack up your office and move along to the no-show lobbying job that awaits you on K. Street?

So, if you're keeping score at home, the Republicans in this catastrophe-in-waiting are being led by Mike Simpson of Idaho, a guy who's made a career out of concocting monster-stories about the tyrannical EPA while the putative Democratic leader is a guy who, in the two very public jobs he's held since leaving the University of Tennessee as The Quarterback Peyton Manning Helped Us Forget, has had a disconcerting tendency to throw the ball to the other team. Because that's the way the second-leading Democrat in the House wants it to be.

(And this Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming who's mentioned in the piece? She's a real prize, too, and, not incidentally, a wingnut movie star, and rich as all hell, which, of course, does not keep her from scarfing down some of that sweet crude sugar-daddy money from the Koch brothers.)